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The EAS Archives
The EAS Archives (often with "The" capitalized) is a site started by WindozeNT with the aim to provide a site dedicated entirely to the collection of recordings of public warnings systems, including CONELRAD, Emergency Broadcast System, Emergency Alert System, AMBER, NOAA Weather Radio and Alerte Enlevèment alerts. Additionally, he plans to make the site support live streaming of currently issued alerts. History The original EAS Archives was launched sometime in early 2012 as WindozeNT's response to the utter lack of sites providing live feeds or recordings of public warning alerts. Shortly after its launch, the entire site remained completely dormant. On January 6, 2013, WindozeNT tried again, switching webhosts and shutting down the old site. After an extensive search, he acquired about 75 recordings of public alerts and uploaded them to the site via FTP after converting them to MP4s (or MP3s for audio files) and giving them specialized filenames. After weeks of work, indexing the files and gathering more recordings, The EAS Archives officially became functional on January 23, 2013. Work on the site yielded one new WindozeNT Software product: The EAS Archives Link Generator, which was created for internal use. Additionally, The EAS Archives was where WindozeNT first wrote in PHP, creating a script that dynamically generated a webpage for viewing the recorded alerts and their associated details. On February 25, 2013, it was discovered that, for unknown reasons, a total of approximately 47% of uploaded media files went missing from the server. However, all of the files that vanished from the server that day spontaneously reappeared on the server 3 days after their disappearance. This happened yet again just 6 months later, though the files have since been manually restored by WindozeNT. In late April 2013, The EAS Archives was taken offline by 000webhost, the site's hosting provider, for a content review process but never put it back online after the process completed. This left the site offline and unable to be accessed for at least 2 weeks. It finally went back online on May 10, 2013 after WindozeNT contacted the webhost. On May 10, 2013, a sitemap was successfully added to the site. In April 2014, The EAS Archives' forum was shut down after the launch of WindozeNT Software Forums, which contains a board for The EAS Archives. February 2013 Media Player Upgrade On February 9, 2013, WindozeNT made substantial changes to the internal code of the site that controlled how metadata about the recordings were obtained and displayed. The result was a new version (v1.2) of the script that obtained all needed data about a recording from a MySQL database by means of a unique identification number sent as a query string. This new implementation of the script completely eliminated the original version's get-all-data-from-query-string system. Initially, this new player wasn't backward-compatible with v1.0-formatted URLs but on February 28, 2013, WindozeNT updated the script to v1.2.5, which added backward-compatibility with v1.0 URLs. The query-string-only version of the script was retained on the site to display miscellaneous media files that aren't alerts (such as files listed in the Extras page). The old version of the player received an upgrade that printed a disclaimer if there was an absence of the new "forced" query in the URL. This was added for the backward-compatibility system implemented in the newer player. The EAS Archives v2 On March 5, 2013, WindozeNT started work on and finished a version of the site completely rewritten from scratch, which went live immediately after testing. The new site, written in HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript and SQL, was created with the intent to give WindozeNT much more control over the site (which normally could not be offered by a web builder) and to enable the site to automatically update itself when a new entry was created in the database, speeding up the process of adding an alert recording to the site. Additionally, the site made use of a view controller, which displayed pages in content inside an IFrame. The next day, the site was updated with a website statistics indicator that showed at the bottom of each page. The site's design mirrors the old version's design, including layout and red color scheme. As of June 2014, with the launch of the new WindozeNT Software site, WindozeNT plans to rewrite the majority of The EAS Archives' site. Format The EAS Archives has a page for each individual public warning system. Alerting systems very similar to each other are grouped into one page (i.e. CONELRAD alerts are in the CONELRAD page while EBS, EAS and NWS alerts share the same page, etc.). Alert pages start with a small info paragraph about the system it represents. Alerts stored on the page are listed below, organized by their issue data and if necessary, their callsigns (if known). They are shown with a title (which links to their file), how long they are, the system they use (if multiple systems share the same page), the type of alert they are (EAS-equivalent types are always used), where they was issued, the callsign and name of the station that issued them and the date they were issued. Alerts concerning abductions contain an additional 2 lines providing the name of the person(s) abducted and their current status (found, not found or unknown) For alerts in foreign languages, an (approximate) English translation is provided. Live feeds Although not offered yet, The EAS Archives plans to have a similar system for organizing live feeds for current alerts, each system having its own dedicated page. Live feeds will be stored on the alert system's respective live feeds page where it will then move to the regular archive pages when no longer in effect. See Also WindozeNT Software PodTricks, a now defunct tips-and-tricks site that ran from February 2011 to February 2012 The EAS Archives Link Generator, a now-discontinued internal-use program used to generate URLs for The EAS Archives' old metadata system. Emergency population warning page on Wikipedia External Links The EAS Archives on Twitter The EAS Archives on Facebook #easarchives on IRC (Freenode) Category:Online services